Scarlet song
Mariama Ba's second novel, following So Long a Letter. A Senegalese man and a French woman marry across a divide that neither family accepts, and the marriage is worn down by cultural expectation, his mother's hostility and his eventual return to convention. Ba died before its publication in 1981. Like her first book it is concise, unsparing about what tradition costs women specifically, and central to francophone West African writing.